World’s largest cross platform instant messaging app WhatsApp has announced its new service to help businesses, both small and big, connect and communicate easily with their consumers.

WhatsApp gave this information through an official blogpost wherein it said ‘WhatsApp Business’ is designed for small businesses and addresses three challenges of lack of a business profile, managing messages at scale and managing customers at one place.

The platform is building and testing tools to enable businesses notify services and/or status of services to their customers, that too free of cost in case of SMBs.

“We’re building and testing new tools via a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and an enterprise solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-Commerce sites, and banks,” the blogpost read.

WhatsApp Business offers 3 features – It gives users a verified green checkmark badge next to their names; Businesses can create a company profile with information such as address, business hours, description of product or service offered; It manages consumer chats.

The capabilities we are offering are free to use. But we do plan to charge businesses in the future. The focus right now is getting businesses on the platform

WhatsApp ensured that the chat between the business and its customer will be end-to-end encrypted. Also, users will be facilitated with blocking feature to avoid receiving messages or notifications from any business.